which I responded to by not blogging for a month, therefore avoiding responsibility by not writing at all- even though if it was only self imposed responsibility which few people even see. But tonight I have decided to buck up and finish this so that I can blog in the future without feeling irrational guilt.
1. Link to the person who tagged you (check. At least twice)
2. Post the rules on your blog (uh, check? Seems kind of silly)
3. Write six random things about yourself (This is where I start to freak out because I have no clue of what to write)
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs (And this is where I get out of something, because I don't even *know* six people who blog, well, at least who haven't already done this meme.)
5. Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website. (off the hook-- boo-ya)
6. Let your tagger know when your entry is up. (well, now)
In some ways I think that writing six random things about myself should be easy. There are many random things about me. However, random doesn't necessarily mean interesting, and it seems like something of a waste to post boring random things. I want my random things to tell a story- to draw people in and form a sense of commonality of all our experiences. So, please bear with me in my grand attempt.
1) I measure time in people's ages.
That doesn't really make a lot of sense written down, so let me try to explain. In some ways, everyone measures time in age. I'm 30, my cousin is 17 and my father is in his 50s. But when I think about events and objects, I measure that in age. A school year is a pregnancy- about 9 months. I've been married for almost a toddler- just about 2 years- but have been with my husband for a 4th grader- 10 years. I've lived in New York City for a nearly a 3rd grader- 8 years. I like being able to visualize how long something is, and measuring in people's ages really helps me do that. And in case you were wondering, if all goes well, I'll be retiring by the time
Kajal's beautiful little girl is a 25 year old woman, graduated from college, and making her way in the world.
2) I often get along with children better than I get along with adults.
I really like playing. At family gatherings, I will rarely be found socializing with the adults in the kitchen, but instead will be the one playing game upon game of tic-tac-toe, or hide and seek. I will roll down a hill or play tag or jump from colored square to colored square on the rug in my bedroom. I love coloring books, crayons, plain white paper and paint. I like not having the pressure to be an adult. If you need a babysitter, call me.
3)
This made me cry. And laugh- don't get me wrong. But totally cry. It made me think of the beauty of humanity and the world. I must have too many hormones or something.
4) Music isn't a big thing to me.
I mean, don't get me wrong- I like music and all. But music seems to mean way more to 99.25% of the people in the world than it does to me. I got through high school both listening to the radio and
swingin' on the flippity-flop, but I was more into obsessively listening to my copies of Oliver! and The Secret Garden (oh, Mandy Patinkin, how I love you). By the time I entered college I owned about 20 CDs (Brianna will scoff at this number, and label it closer to 5 with one of those being En Vogue, so does it even count?), the majority of them being Billy Joel and Broadway musicals. I was fine with that. My major musical influences now are as follows: Dar Williams, Ani DiFranco, Ben Folds and no, actually I think that's it. I supplement with The Postal Service, Jets to Brazil and whatever it is that my husband is currently listening to. And I'm still just fine with this.
5) I grew up
on next to a farm.
When my parents bought the house I grew up in, you couldn't see another house in any direction. Straight ahead, out of the front door- a farm. To the left, woods, then a farm. To the right, woods, then a tree nursery. To the back, woods, then the same farm that was to the left. The man whom my parents bought their land from was the farmer who lived down the street (and owned the farm that we were mostly surrounded by).
When I was little, you could see houses, but they were still pretty far away. My brother and I would run through the woods to the fields behind our house to pick strawberries and corn. We would ride our bikes through the dirt paths (we weren't allowed to ride on our surprisingly busy street with a 40mph speed limit and small shoulder) and feed long pieces of grass to the
cows steer. My uncle married one of the farmer's daughters and they built a house in the woods to our right. My aunt taught us how to dig for potatoes and her father fed us cow's tongue sandwiches (I opted for good old fashioned PBJ). Now that the farm is condos and a golf course, I'm pretty nostalgic for my rural youth, with all the pros of living on the farm, with none of the "getting up early" or "taking care of vegetables" that seemed to take the romance out of actually being Laura Ingalls Wilder.
6) I've never really broken a bone (though I once fractured my middle finger in gym class)
If I ever play "two truths and a lie" with you, my lie is that I broke my leg during gymnastics in 7th grade (one of my truths is #5). Though I did suffer a nasty bruise from falling off the balance beam that year after attempting a 360 degree jump during practice, my bones have stayed more or less in one piece for my entire life.
The only minor exception to this random fact also occurred in middle school. We had co-ed gym, which to adolescent girls is both "whoo!" in the fact that they get proximity to adolescent boys (which is desired) and "egads!" for the same reason (though most people would not say egads). My gym teachers- Mr. C and Mr. S (Mr. C actually went by Mr. C; Mr. S went by his name, but I later dated his son, so I'll refer to him by S to give him some anonymity) decided that they wanted us to weight train by doing stations through the gym. This was awesome for them (which I can totally vouch for now as an actual teacher- great strategy guys!) as they could teach us for about 1 day on the correct way to use each station, and then spend the rest of the unit sitting at the side of the gym bullshitting as we did what they taught us to do on day one. It was really the workshop model at it's best, and I applaud them. However, I was kind of a dumbass, and probably to impress some boy that wouldn't pay attention to me until I was 25 and way hotter than I was at 13, I used weights that were too heavy for me to do a
Dumbbell Lateral Raise (I just had to spend about 5 minutes googling that). The weight of the dumbbells made it so that instead of the weights coming together in a slow, controlled movement, they crashed together really hard. And when I say "together" I mean a weight sandwich with my middle finger as the meat inside dumbbell bread. The Misters C and S ignored my tears and gave me a band-aid. A week later my finger still hurt a lot, making my mother bring me to the doctor. Some x-rays later, my middle finger was was in a splint and a bandage, making it so puking in Math class actually wasn't the worst thing that happened to me in Middle School.
So, that's my meme. I hope you enjoyed it, and now I can go back to not blogging because I'm lazy rather than through misguided guilt.
